Muke's growing journey

So this week I tried an experiment sort of related to last week’s… I went for ‘fast food’ at home. It’s a lot cheaper to buy the stuff myself, and it turns out I can get comparable calories without much difficulty.

And it worked out pretty well, I think. Nothing like being able to meet your calorie goal after two meals, instead of four. Of course, I still lost some when the weekend hit, but if I can keep this up maybe I can turn my slump around.

I haven’t been posting much in the way of new pics lately… I’m going to need to try and work on that more, but usually I just ain’t up to taking pictures these days.

This week I tried a sort of experiment: Since I had food left in the house, I decided to eschew grocery shopping for the week and use the money to eat out instead.

I tell you, if I could afford to eat out every day, I’d probably get pretty big pretty quick. I was getting about 2500 calories in a meal easily from Burger King. I don’t know how they fit all that in there; I’m sure if I were to make the same amount of food at home I wouldn’t come up with half the calories. Likewise, the stuff is easier to eat: I get a microwave burrito at home and it’s essentially a brick, even after it’s cooked; the Taco Bell burrito has more calories and, especially in comparison, is practically fluffy.

Of course the catch is that I can’t afford to eat out all the time. I got maybe three or four meals out of my grocery budget that should last a week. When I worked at Burger King I saw people that would come in every day for lunch; I have no idea how that works out.

So I ended up at a lower weight this week because, while I managed to put on weight steadily through the first half of the week while I was still eating out, I lost it all the second half of the week eating normal food. (At the moment I’m running even lower than Saturday morning’s 202 weigh-in; I spent the remainder of the weekend out of town eating on someone else’s dime.)

I’ve been going through this slump for the past week or so, where I just haven’t felt like eating.

I don’t really know how to push past this, but I wish I could. Those of you who’ve been watching me a while know I put on about fifteen pounds last year from the time I started posting on this blog, but since then haven’t made any substantial progress.

I’ve discovered I have pretty strong mental blocks in place. I tried a session with a hypnotist a couple of weeks ago. The trance state worked, but the suggestions didn’t: I look over the transcript and in response to instructions to increase desire to gain I have answers like I don’t know how to want it… I try not to want, just work… and But I want to get rid of [it]… distracting, selfish and Hungry doesn’t make me want to eat (you all already know that last one).

And I guess that’s basically my difficulty. I will be big. But it’s not something I “want” to do—it’s something I plan to do, something I intend to do, something I’m trying to do, but it’s not something I have the urges to do I had when I was younger. In a way, I don’t have a problem with this: desire leads to suffering, as they say, and I’m a lot happier not being miserable about my body like I used to be. But not having that urge behind my generally weak willpower isn’t conducive to pushing me to gain.

I suppose this is what an encourager would be for, but I still have yet to meet an encourager who has any idea what he’s doing.

I’m backsliding! Onoz! Hehe.

This week, really, I guess I wasn’t paying too close attention to gaining. At least, that’s what it felt like. I think I was sticking pretty well to my calorie budget this week, because I hit 208 again before the weekend hit me. Calorie estimate was 2690 for the week, 3275 if you only count weekdays. Unfortunately my body doesn’t stop for weekends like the rest of me seems to.

I didn’t get any questions from IRC this week, but you guys can feel free to ask me anything you like here—just leave a comment.